Word Association

Here's a nice old, seedy old, despondent old French door, which seems to me to be extraordinarily evocative, with its closed blinds and peeling shutters and faded paint. I think you could probably construct a whole narrative just from looking at it for long enough -- one thought leads to another and then to another.

It's the same with words: one conjures another and you can start adding links to a magical chain.

Because it's the start of 2011 and I'm still childishly, rather obviously obsessed with beginnings, I think that using word association can be a great way to kick start a story, or more particularly, a poem. Why don't you try it for yourself?  Choose a word that can have a number of different meanings, a word like soil, perhaps, and write down everything that comes into your head in response to it.  Allow yourself a couple of minutes to really scour round for all the possibilities, then spend a few more minutes contemplating the words you have come up with and see what ideas they suggest to you and before you know it you are starting to shape these ideas into something a little less random, a little more coherent, and then you're putting on a bit of length and before you know it, you have written something.